Dean Baquet (b. 1956) rises from a Creole restaurant family in the Tremé to the top of the most powerful newsroom in the country, without a college degree, on reporting talent and a hard institutional sense. He carries two heroes into that chair, and the years he runs the place keep forcing the two to fight. One is the accountability man, the digger who exposes what power hides and defends the reporting against the spreadsheet. The other is the witness from the Tremé, the first Black editor of a paper whose old neutrality wrote his own people as a footnote. Most of his troubles, and most of his achievement, come from holding both at once.
Name the frame. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) called a culture’s scheme for earning significance a hero system, the account of what makes a life worth living and a death bearable, the faith that sorts the worthy from the wasted. Baquet’s faith is the institution and the work it produces, the verified exposure that changes the world and the great paper that carries it past any one man. His significance comes from the record, from documenting Chicago’s crooked council and Harvey Weinstein’s abuse (b. 1952) and Donald Trump‘s (b. 1946) tax returns. His immortality is the paper, larger and richer when he leaves it than when he arrived, and the investigative tradition he hands on. Near the end he turns to the dying local newsrooms and tries to keep their reporting alive, the keeper of a flame against the dark.
His first terror takes shape in Los Angeles. He runs the Los Angeles Times there, gathers prizes, and when the corporate owner demands cut after cut he refuses in public and loses the job for it. The lesson sets hard. The enemy is the spreadsheet, the accountant who hollows the newsroom until the paper survives as a name with no one left to report under it. He watches the metropolitan press collapse, the local papers go dark across the country, the reporting capacity that held towns accountable bleed out. So his hero stands against the death of reporting, and he carries the scar of that fight into every room.
Then comes the creed. He defends the old reporting faith. The journalist gathers verifiable facts and does not march as an activist. The reporter strips his politics and his wishes and lays the checked world on the page. He becomes the loudest editor in the country against Twitter, which he says tricks the journalist into mistaking a small loud crowd for the public and shrinks the field of sight, and he limits how his people may use it. That is the subtraction story of the trade, reality with the activism strained out, the report from no particular side.
He believes it, and he does not entirely believe it. The boy from the Tremé knows from the inside that the old neutral paper was never neutral, that its view from nowhere was the view from a comfortable White establishment that wrote his community small. Under him the paper runs the 1619 Project, led by Nikole Hannah-Jones (b. 1976), which moves slavery to the center of the American story, the most ambitious and most contested history the paper has tried. To its admirers it corrects the record at last. To its critics, among them eminent historians, it bends history toward a thesis. Set the project beside the Twitter crackdown and the same man does two opposite things, defending the report from no side and publishing the boldest argument from a side the paper has run in a generation. He is not a hypocrite. He is two heroes in one body, and the era will not let them live in peace.
The collisions come on a schedule. In 2020 the opinion pages run an essay by Senator Tom Cotton (b. 1977) urging troops into the streets during the unrest after George Floyd (1973-2020) is killed, and the newsroom revolts, hundreds of staff saying the piece endangers their Black colleagues, and the editor of the page resigns. Baquet does not run opinion, but the quarrel is his quarrel, the free-expression institutionalist and the justice-seeking staff at war inside his house, and the staff win. A year later veteran science reporter Donald G. McNeil leaves over a racial slur he used years before, and the handling pleases no one, the institutionalists calling it a panic and the activists calling it too slow. The verdict that fits the whole late stretch is that Baquet satisfied no one and it is hard to find a vantage point where he does not appear cowardly.
He is ringed, like any man at a center, and the rivals press from every side.
The corporate hero forged him. The spreadsheet that fired him in Los Angeles is the same logic that kills the local press he later tries to save, and it tells him his stand was romance, that reporting is a cost and the market does not owe it a living. Baquet, alone among his kind, beats this rival at The New York Times, where digital subscriptions climb from one million to more than nine and prove that readers will pay for the work. The victory carries a sting he does not price, and the close will come back to it.
The activist hero rises inside his own building, his younger staff, for whom the verifiable-facts creed is a dodge that guards the strong and exposes the weak, for whom both-sides fairness is a harm wearing a tie. The Cotton revolt is this rival taking the field and winning a yard inside the house meant to hold the line.
The independent hero stands outside it, the writer with a newsletter and no masthead, the foil to everything Baquet is, since Baquet is the pure institutionalist, never the columnist or the brand or the entrepreneur, the man who believes the building is the point. To the independent the building is the problem, a slow and captured thing, and the reporter is freer without it.
The oldest rival, and the spine of the others, is the trad and the nationalist, the man of faith and nation and place, and he reads Baquet’s center as a costume. He hears verifiable facts, not activism, and then he reads 1619 as the new catechism of the schools, and he decides the creed is a courtesy the paper extends to itself. To him the Times is no referee of the national story. It is a party to it, and Baquet’s pride in taking fire from both sides is the self-flattery of an institution that chose its side long ago and mistakes the complaints of the losing half for proof of balance. His world, the church and the flag and the founders as heroes, appears in the paper as a problem to be corrected, a history to be revised, never a people to be heard on its own ground.
Baquet names the activist danger out loud and fights it. He calls out the platform that warps his trade. And he knows, in a way the credentialed rarely do, that the old neutrality was a standpoint and not the absence of one, because he came up on the wrong side of that standpoint and felt it erase him. That double sight is rare and real. What he cannot do is resolve the two heroes or count what holding both costs the thing he loves. The institution’s authority drains from both ends at once. The trad stops trusting it because of the turn that 1619 announces, and the activist finds it too slow because of the caution the old creed demands, and the broad legitimacy Baquet prizes above all thins precisely because he tries to honor both faiths in one paper.
Baquet’s hero is doubled, the accountability institutionalist who saves the paper and breaks the great stories, and the witness from the Tremé who knows the neutral record was a White man’s record and means to fix it. His rivals ring him on every side, the spreadsheet that forged and fired and then lost to him, the activist staff who win a room in his house, the independent who needs no house, and the trad who reads his center as a side in referee’s clothes. The cost his ledger cannot read is folded inside his proudest number. The nine million who pay are not the country. They are a tribe, the educated and the like-minded, the half that already trusts the paper, and the business he builds to save journalism rests on selling that half a mirror it is glad to buy. He wins the market by narrowing the congregation. The subscriptions and the lost legitimacy are not two stories. They are one, and the ledger counts only the half that pays.
He set out to keep the great reporting alive, and on his best days he does, MeToo and the tax records and a newsroom that outlived the verdict of every actuary who buried it. On his ordinary days he is the steward of a tribe’s paper of record, holding a center that fewer and fewer believe is the center, certain to the end that the fire from both sides means he stands in the middle.
